Websites for Interior Designers

The gap that ends enquiries

Clients research interiors for months through images, and images carry no price.

They arrive with a clear sense of what they want and no framework for what it costs, and frequently no distinction in their mind between the design fee and the cost of furnishing the room.

That produces the familiar pattern: an enthusiastic enquiry, a warm meeting, a proposal, and silence.

Closing that gap is a content problem and it costs nothing to fix.

Explaining how designers charge

Clients do not know, and the models are genuinely different.

Hourly, which is transparent and makes clients anxious about an open-ended total.

Flat fee per room or per project, which is predictable and requires a defined scope.

Percentage of the project cost, which scales and which clients sometimes read as an incentive to specify expensively.

Cost plus, where furnishings are purchased at trade and a markup applied.

Combinations, which is what most practices actually use.

Explaining which you use, and why, is more useful than quoting a figure for an unseen project. Clients mainly want to understand the structure so they can predict how it behaves.

The minimum, which is the real filter

The single most useful thing to publish.

Stating a minimum project size, or a starting design fee, prevents the enquiry from somebody wanting a single room refreshed on a budget that cannot support a designer.

It also stops a practice looking unapproachable when it declines, since the client knew before contacting.

Also worth separating: the design fee against the furnishing budget. A client should understand that a design fee is a fraction of what the room will cost, and that a project with no furnishing budget cannot be executed regardless of the fee paid.

Service tiers

The structure that captures work at several levels rather than only at the top.

A consultation, paid, a couple of hours, producing direction rather than documentation. This is the entry point that converts enquiries that could not afford full service.

Remote or online design, where the client executes from a plan and a shopping list. Lower fee, wider geography, and it reaches clients who would otherwise not engage anybody.

Full service, with procurement, project coordination, and installation.

Publishing all three, with what each includes and costs, means an enquiry that cannot afford one can take another rather than disappearing.

The process

Clients do not know what they are buying or how long it takes.

1. Initial consultation, and whether it is charged.
2. Concept and direction, and what they receive.
3. Detailed design and specification.
4. Procurement, and who holds the orders and the risk.
5. Coordination with trades, and whether you manage them.
6. Installation and styling.

Lead times deserve emphasis, since furniture ordering is slow and clients consistently underestimate it. Stating that a full project runs months rather than weeks prevents the frustration that otherwise attaches to you.

Procurement, which needs stating clearly

The commercial and practical arrangement clients least understand.

Whether you purchase on their behalf, whether trade discounts are passed on or retained as your margin, who pays for what and when, and who is responsible if something arrives damaged or is discontinued.

Being explicit about how you are compensated on furnishings is worth doing rather than leaving implicit, since a client who discovers a markup they did not know about feels differently about everything else.

Returns and custom orders are worth a line too, since custom pieces are typically non-returnable and clients do not expect that.

The portfolio, improved

Strong in this profession and improvable in the same way as architecture.

Finished rooms photograph beautifully and communicate style. What they do not communicate is scope, budget range, constraints, or what the designer actually contributed.

Adding the project type, the rough investment range where the client permits, the constraints worked within, and before images turns a beautiful photograph into something a prospect can measure themselves against.

Before images particularly, since they show the transformation rather than the result, and they make the contribution visible.

The rest

What you do not do, such as structural work or trades coordination if you leave those to others. Your geographic range, and whether remote work extends it. Whether you take commercial alongside residential, which are different practices. And a clear enquiry route asking for the room, the timeline, and the budget range, since a proposal built without those is a proposal built on guesses, which is the same expectation gap described in websites for cabinet makers and millwork.

Frequently asked questions

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